Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Two voices, Doug,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure, but how do we know this Demarest person isn’t some kind of nut? How do we know she isn’t making it up about Henry Falcon and the Hausermann woman? And how do we know that the other voice, the one that doesn’t belong to Chapman, is on the level? We don’t, do we?”

  “Still defending your ideas about Chapman, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re frayed, Doug. Frayed and beat. If Madeleine Demarest is right, your theory’s fucked.”

  Moody shrugged. “I don’t know, Frank. I just don’t know.”

  “Listen, say you had pushed Billy into three confessions, you think the DA wouldn’t have laughed you out of his office?”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Nightingale was silent a moment. “Didn’t that voice give you the creeps? Could you imagine he wasn’t tell the truth?”

  “Yeah, I could imagine that.”

  Yeah, Nightingale thought.

  You still want Billy Chapman.

  You still want that.

  He glanced at his watch. “Well, we’ll soon know, won’t we? We’ll soon know if somebody called Randy was killed in Shelbyville, Ohio, won’t we? Then we can check out this Demarest woman—apparently there are even more tapes.”

  Moody didn’t speak.

  He appeared to sulk, like a man who has been carried along on a raft of convictions that has turned out to be a featherbed of delusions—and the waters underneath were treacherous. Poor Moody, if all this information turns out to be right. Nightingale felt a touch of sympathy for his partner. You’ll learn, kid. It’ll take time, but you’ll learn.

  The telephone was ringing. Nightingale picked it up. It was the hick from Shelbyville, Sheriff Hercules Vansittart. Nightingale imagined good old boys sitting out in front of a gas station chewing tobacco and spitting juice, holding daily contests to see who could spit the furthest. He imagined one street of frame houses, a funeral parlor, and one local industry. The Shelbyville Peapod Company. Or the Shelbyville Lens Grinding Corporation. And everybody in the whole town would be employed by it, except for Herc and maybe his deputy, who was called Clarence. Herc and Clar, the tin-badged wonders.

  “Is that New York City?” the hoarse voice asked.

  “This is Lieutenant Nightingale.”

  “Herc Vansittart getting back to you,” the voice said. “Hey, did you say Nightingale?”

  Nightingale held his breath. Waited.

  “Hey-hey, I bet criminals just sing all day long for you, huh?” Chortle, chortle.

  Nightingale still didn’t speak. He looked at Moody and rolled his eyes. It was easy to imagine Herc, squat and plump, a beer can in his big paw, suspenders outside his shirt.

  “Good one, huh?” Here asked.

  “Best I ever heard,” Nightingale said. “What have you got for me there?”

  The line was terrible. Every so often he could hear snatches of country music, as if a radio were somehow connected to the wires. “But the doggone river was dry …” I need yodeling right now, he thought. It was one thing he just couldn’t stand.

  “You got a radio on there, Here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I keep hearing this tune.”

  “With a name like yours, I ain’t surprised.” Chortle chortle. I walked straight into that one. Like a goddamn fool I walked right into that wall.

  “Yeah, good one, Here. So what can you tell me?”

  “If this is the same case we’re talking, lieutenant, you got a lulu, a goddamn lulu.”

  “Like how?” Nightingale picked up a pencil, found a sheet of paper.

  “You mentioned some kid called Randy. I had to go back twelve years, lieutenant. Twelve years.”

  “I’m grateful.”

  “This kid called Randy Carmichael was found dead in the woods ’round here. His head had been pretty badly stoved in. It caused quite a ruckus ’round these parts, let me tell you. I wasn’t the sheriff then. That was old Matt Rawlings back then. He’s been dead and buried these past six years.”

  Christ, give me the history of law enforcement in southern Ohio—please, I’ve been waiting for years to hear it.

  “I’ve only been in this office two years. But I remember Randy Carmichael pretty well, because of the stir it caused. So I went back through the files for you. It seems Randy had this buddy called Adam Hawley. And these two boys went walking in the woods. Only Adam came back with some story about how he and his buddy had split up. Well, there was some splitting up going on, for sure. Only it was Randy’s head, lieutenant. There wasn’t no motive. Adam Hawley was obviously a suspect, see. The kids might have argued, had a fight, then it got right outta hand. Adam denied it all. He didn’t have nothing to do with his pal’s death. Oh, no, he wouldn’t have done a thing like that.” Pause. More country music. “I got a feeling called the blues …” “Anyway, about three weeks later the kid finally cracked. Said he didn’t remember anything except voices in his head and they was telling him what to do and he couldn’t resist. Voices in his head, lieutenant, you got that? Anyhow, he was a juvenile and you know what that means, so he gets all kinds of psychiatric tests. Batteries they call them. Batteries of tests. It turns out the kid is highly unhinged. A regular lulu.”

  “Like how?”

  Vansittart seemed to ignore the question. “He gets himself locked away for a few years in the county asylum at the age of sixteen he breaks out. We got him back from Chicago that time. It seems he’d jumped into the sack with this old queer and strangled him. So he goes back inside the asylum.”

  Pause. Nightingale waited.

  “Here’s your bad news, lieutenant. Adam Hawley escaped from County again about nine months ago. We’ve never been able to find him. To be honest, we gave up. We figured he’d turn up sooner or later. Now I got some highfalutin shrink report right here in front of me.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It’s a real jewel, lieutenant. I don’t know how much faith you put in shrinks, but the gist of this is that Adam Hawley likes to kill. The act of murder makes him feel good. It makes him feel good to take another human life. He sees it as his special talent in life. He doesn’t have any goddarn motive or anything like that. I mean you don’t need to cross him if you want to be his victim—he just has this basic pleasure in killing. What do you think of that? Killing is his thing in life.”

  A chill crossed Nightingale’s heart. A talent for murder, he thought. A guy who just likes to kill. A monster. Someone monstrous enough to have murdered Henry Falcon and butchered Jamey Hausermann and God knows who else since his escape.

  “You want I should send these reports to you?”

  “I’d appreciate that, Sheriff.”

  “No problem. You think Adam Hawley’s in New York City?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good luck, but don’t be sending him back out here, huh?”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “One other thing.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “When he was picked up in Chicago, it seems he wasn’t calling himself Adam no more.”

  “Yeah?” Nightingale poised his pencil over his paper.

  “Called himself George. No second name. Just plain George. I figure he might be using the same alias. Or maybe some other one. I thought I’d pass it along.”

  “Thanks again,” Nightingale said. He put the receiver down and looked at Moody, who had been listening on the extension. He wanted to say something to his young partner, but didn’t. Moody’s expression was dark: brow lined, mouth distended. What’s he thinking now? What’s ticking inside the Boy Wonder right now? Maybe he sees his mistakes. Maybe he understands the way old poisons distort everything. And you were on the edge of going along with him, Frank. You’d let yourself get carried that far.

  You were on the edge of abdicating, passing the crown to younger blood.

  Stanislavski was standing in the doorway, looking exhausted. He also looked she
epish. He had a piece of paper in his hand. He said, “I don’t know why this took so goddamn long, lieutenant. Barrows took the message and somehow it got stuck on my desk when I was out at Tully’s, then when I came back Barrows had gone off-duty and somehow this got caught in the old paper shuffle. Jeez, what can I say?”

  Nightingale took the message from Stanislavski’s unsteady hand. “What the fuck kind of place are we running around here? Jesus, Jesus Christ!” Enraged, Nightingale picked up the telephone. He looked at the name on the piece of paper. She was at a place called the Bryant Berger Gallery on 57th Street with Harry Harrison. What were they doing up there anyhow? He got the number from the operator and listened as it rang several times. If they’re up there, why don’t they answer, for Christ’s sake?

  Why don’t they just pick up the telephone and say something?

  Because they can’t.

  For some reason, they can’t—and that reason is Adam or George or whatever the hell this maniac calls himself.

  Nightingale stood up and reached for his coat. “Okay, Doug. Let’s get moving. I think we’ve got ourselves a crisis.” And then he was huffing and puffing along the corridor, his lungs feeling like two rusted Brillo pads scouring his chest, his bandaged arm—despite the treatment of Nurse Maxymuk—hurting like all hell.

  9.

  The first thing she thought was: He looks familiar. He looks very familiar, that red hair, the jacket, the way he grins. Maybe he’d come into the gallery once. But it wasn’t that kind of memory. It was more like a face she’d glimpsed through a window, an unusual kind of face. Square, as if it had been sculpted. Good-looking in its own odd pretty way. And the red hair was memorable, like the barber had taken a course in punk styling. Then he didn’t look so familiar after all and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen him. Probably not. He moved into shadow again and something glinted, then was extinguished, in his right hand. And then she heard it—the laughter, the same sound she’d heard on the tape, the sound she knew she’d dream about for as long as she might live. She stepped back, skirting the desk.

  Fear congeals, lies inside your chest like a lump of something insoluble.

  And it stays there as if it might never go away.

  The telephone was ringing suddenly. A savage metallic sound.

  After several rings it stopped dead.

  She looked at Harry; he was standing near the office door with his hands at his sides. She backed further away.

  She was on the other side of the desk.

  Mr. Berger.

  Mr. Berger, she thought.

  He lay propped against the wall behind the desk and there was a necktie knotted around his neck and his eyes stared unseeingly. Mr. Berger, half dressed, shirt buttons open, fly unzipped, a single shoe on one foot. She heard a pounding rushing noise inside her head, a noise that went cutting through her like the sound you might imagine a million locusts might make with their wings. Is there no end to it? No end to the dying? It’s all around you, encircling you, touching you with its scents and odors and broken appearances. It begins with a telephone call and it escalates from there as if one single voice at the end of a line had risen and risen until there was utter babble, total incomprehensible babble.…

  Mr. Berger.

  She became conscious of footsteps just beyond the office door.

  He had moved out of the shadows again. He stood there grinning.

  She watched Harry take a step back from the doorway.

  She clutched the edge of the desk. She thought she could hear herself moaning, but the sound didn’t seem like any part of her.

  Then she was conscious of Harry’s tense breathing.

  She stared at the knife in the young man’s hand. It had a red handle. She wondered idly why he didn’t speak, why he didn’t say anything, why he stood there just holding the knife out in front of his body as if he were mesmerized by it.

  He uttered a single word: “Apology?”

  Harry didn’t say anything. What’s he thinking? What’s going through his mind right now?

  “Apology?”

  “Yes,” Harrison said.

  “I thought I’d killed you.…” The grin again, the weird laughter. “I guess I made a mistake.”

  He’s looking at me now, she thought.

  Straight at me.

  “I’ve seen you before, Madeleine. I’ve seen you here in the gallery. I saw you in a bar.” He paused. She tried to imagine this boy killing Levy, stabbing him; tried to grasp the frenzy—wondered what poor Rube had thought about at the very end. Pain. The suddenness of things. Her mind went blank. He was looking at Harry again.

  “I figured you’d look different, Apology. I don’t know. I just figured you’d be a different kind of guy.” He moved forward a little way with the knife. Those eyes—they were cold and chilly and empty, as if what they reflected far within was an absence of compassion, humanity, vitality.

  Why doesn’t Harry say something? Do something?

  “Swiss army knife,” the boy was saying. “About the best ever made.… Did you see poor old Berger back there? I had to do it, you understand? Once you start killing it’s so hard to stop. Then you enjoy it and you don’t even ask questions about it; it just comes naturally—” He moved forward again. “Apology, huh? Christ. What was the big idea, advertising yourself like that?”

  The big idea, she thought.

  She couldn’t remember now.

  Whatever it had once meant, it was lost. Lost and gone.

  “It wasn’t a very good idea, was it, Apology? I can think of a thousand better ones … like the one I’m thinking about now. You and her. Both of you.” He laughed aloud. “I’ve never worked on a pair before.”

  He might have been talking about two playing cards, nothing that had anything to do with human life. She realized she’d never encountered anybody like this before; it was beyond her memories, her experiences. He whispered my name in the bar, she thought. This monster said my name.…

  “Killing,” he said. “I like it. I don’t know how to do anything else as well as that.”

  She stared at the knife. She watched him flash it in a tiny arc, a gesture that was only meant to frighten. And then the laughter came again, filling the small office.

  “Why don’t you take the knife away, Apology? Impress your old lady. Come and get it.”

  Harry didn’t move. Madeleine put her hands over her ears.

  But she couldn’t take her eyes from the sight of the knife.

  Am I going to die here like a rat? Is this the way it’s all going to end?

  God damn it, no.

  It can’t just end like this.

  There has to be more to live for, much more.

  Suddenly she picked up the desklamp and hurled it, hoping it would strike the kid, watching it flash past his head and hit the wall instead, then drop to the floor.

  He was laughing.

  Feeble, a feeble effort, she thought.

  It comes to nothing.

  “Your old lady’s got more guts than you, Apology. Come on, take the knife. Take it, guy.”

  Harry—why doesn’t he move? Why doesn’t he do something?

  The knife sliced through the air; Harrison stepped quickly back and away from it. It came again and she heard him moan. He was clutching his arm; blood was coming through his shirt, through his fingers. She moved towards him to help but he gestured her away. It’s not just your fight, Harry. It’s mine as well.

  “Take the motherfucking knife.”

  He swung again, missing, laughing as he missed.

  She saw Harry go down on one knee.

  When he started to rise, the knife came again and made a terrible whining sound above his head, as if the air itself were torn apart by the blade. Harry staggered to his feet. He was leaning against the desk, breathing very hard. He glanced at her, a fragment of time—and what she saw in his eyes was a confusion of despair and desperation and regret.

  And then she noticed he had somethin
g small and bright in his hand, an object she didn’t recognize at first but one that was somehow familiar—

  Albert, she thought.

  It was the surgical tool he’d used on Albert.

  It was the same small cutting scalpel.

  10.

  Nightingale got out of the car and touched the shoulder holster beneath his coat. He didn’t like guns. He didn’t like to touch them, didn’t enjoy the way they felt—not like some of the guys who talked endlessly about them, this model and that, velocity, trajectory, caliber, arguing the merits of one pistol over another. It made him sick to think of guns. He hated how they kicked, how they bucked in the palm of your hand. He looked along the sidewalk. He could hardly make out the sign over the gallery. He turned to Moody, indicating the place with a gesture of his head. “The call came from here,” he said.

  “I know the joint,” Moody said. “I browsed in there about two months ago. They had these really painful oriental things on the walls.”

  “Well, this is where our lady is supposed to be,” Nightingale said. He moved along the sidewalk. Moody was at his side. “We’d better go get her.”

  He stared up at the classy sign. The Bryant Berger Gallery. Art had always been a closed world to him. He knew a guy called Sparrow—of all names, why the hell was it another bird?—who worked the art frauds, and Sparrow was always talking about Rembrandt and Van Gogh and Andy Warhol, like he had just come from some cocktail party with those guys. He stopped outside the gallery. The place was in darkness—there was only a slight band of light from far inside, as if there might be another room in there and the door was almost shut. No vital signs. But he did get a slightly choked feeling in his chest. What instinct is this now? he wondered. He stifled a yawn and lowered his head to peer through the glass door, cupping his hand over his eyes. If you could smother your instincts, then they wouldn’t be instincts, he thought. He tried the door. It was locked.